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Australia

By Karima Bennoune, 16 December 2014 - After the deaths of two hostages in a Sydney chocolate shop standoff orchestrated by a man who forced his captives to raise black Islamist flags, it is time to recommit to the struggle against the extremist ideology that twists men like him. We need to be intolerant of intolerance.

Bella is 34 years old. Without her knowledge or consent, she became the victim of forced sterilisation at the age of 12 when her parents took her to hospital for what they told her was an operation to have her appendix removed. Nine years later, during a routine pelvic examination, Bella was told it was her uterus, not her appendix that had been removed.Thirteen years on from her discovery, Bella’s grief and anger are still raw.

A 16-year-old girl has been placed on an airport watch list in Australia after going to court to prevent her parents sending her to Lebanon for a forced marriage.

The Federal Magistrates' Court ruled that the parents of the teenager, who cannot be named, could not remove or attempt to remove their daughter from the country to marry the young man she has met only once.

Magistrate Joe Harman also ordered that the parents not assault, molest, harass, threaten or otherwise intimidate the girl or take her out of school.

A landmark U.N. treaty on women’s rights, which will be 30 years old next week, is in danger of being politically undermined by a slew of reservations by 22 countries seeking exemptions from some of the convention’s legal obligations. “A reservation must not defeat the object and purpose of a treaty,” Ambassador Palitha Kohona, a former chief of the U.N. Treaty Section, told IPS.